With the wolf at the door

Bad weather, and bad rulers, are making millions of people hungry

JENERAH MICHELO sits in her little stick-hut, and politely offers her visitors lunch. It is a generous but symbolic act. Her battered cooking pot is nearly empty, and she is skeletal. She describes how her six children often go without food. Though they got some emergency grain a week before, they still have to resort to leaves from unripe water melons, or poisonous berries that have been well boiled. “This time last year we were eating the harvest. Now we are expecting death by hunger,” she says simply.

Her village, Lusitu, like much of southern Zambia and many parts of southern Africa, suffers from a list of connected problems: late rains, the worst harvest in memory, sharp price increases, and a collapse of the extended family because of AIDS. Lean periods are common in rural Africa, and villagers usually know how to survive. But hunger at harvest-time is a stark warning for the rest of the year.

Now the traditional systems for caring for the old, weak and ill seem under threat. “The others in the village and my relatives, they do not take care of us, mainly because I'm a ‘patient',” says Mrs Michelo, who like one in five of Zambian adults is infected with HIV. Her husband died of AIDS. Neighbours have stolen two of her few remaining chickens. Others in the village describe how their younger relatives fled to towns in search of work and food, but have sent nothing back.

Subsistence farmers here and in Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, parts of Mozambique and much of Zimbabwe are suffering because of late or erratic rain. Unusually, entire crops of maize, groundnuts, cotton and even drought-resistant sorghum have failed.

In a sign of desperation, livestock is being sold at low prices. Some farmers in Malawi resorted to taking unripe crops from their fields. Dozens of thieves caught doing the same have been killed, or had limbs cut off, by angry mobs. The governments of Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Lesotho have each declared a food emergency, and asked for foreign help.

This week the World Food Programme (WFP) revised its April figures for the number of people needing urgent aid in the region from 2.6m to more than 10m. Aid agencies say that more than twice that number could need help if donors are slow to respond or conditions worsen. More than 6m people in Zimbabwe, roughly half the population, will need food aid this year, more than 5m of them immediately. In Malawi, 3m need urgent help. Meteorologists worry about both droughts and floods. UNICEF says 1,000 people have already died from a cholera epidemic that spread after floods followed a dry spell in Malawi. Mountainous Lesotho was also deluged earlier this year.

But nature is only part of the current disaster. Despite the weather, well-run Botswana is unaffected, and South Africa as usual has produced a grain surplus. “The food shortage in 1992 affected 18m people and was a natural disaster. This is different,” says Judith Lewis, the WFP's regional director. Political instability, failing governments and war contribute to the crisis.

Angola is only now emerging from two decades of a civil war that forced farmers from their fields, and has now left it in need of food for up to 1m people. Madagascar had a good harvest, but the island is shaken by a political crisis, and aid workers talk of a “creeping” food emergency: prices have surged as roadblocks, and destroyed bridges, make transport risky and expensive. Even quiet Zambia is hurt by other countries' conflicts, playing host to some 300,000 refugees from wars in Angola and Congo, nearly half of whom depend on food aid.

Not a ruling-party member? No food

Politics has had a particularly pernicious role in Zimbabwe, which has stopped being a net grain exporter and is desperately hungry. The country's usual grain output is 1.8m tons, but poor rains and lousy politics have meant that this year's production has slumped to a mere 480,000 tons.

The invasion of commercial farms by supporters of the ruling ZANU-PF party discouraged farmers from planting and harvesting. Artificially low prices encouraged the hoarding of food, or its smuggling to other countries. With foreign exchange short, importers are struggling to get food to the towns, where shops are bare and malnutrition is spreading. The WFP already supports more than 550,000 Zimbabweans, some of whom would otherwise be surviving on roots and berries.

Making matters much worse, Zimbabwe's government is keeping food from suspected supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Physicians for Human Rights, a relief group, says that officials demand ZANU-PF party cards from anyone registering for “food for work” schemes, as well as from those buying cheap maize from public warehouses. In some rural schools, food is withheld from children whose families are identified as opposition supporters.

Though none is as dramatically at fault as Zimbabwe's, other governments too have made matters worse. In Zambia, the irregular distribution of fertiliser and inadequate irrigation have left farmers far more vulnerable to bad weather than they would otherwise be. Malawi's government is notoriously corrupt: last year it chose to sell 167,000 tons of its emergency grain reserves, and the proceeds seem to have disappeared. Donors have since cut much of their development aid, which in turn has added to the economy's fragility. Even little Swaziland, where 144,000 need help, is out of favour with donors, because of the way its absolute monarch persecutes Swazis who demand democracy.

None of this should prevent emergency food help. The WFP, which cried loud and early about the approaching crisis, says donors are responding well, and have already given $60m of food aid to the region. Much more is needed. But, in the longer term, dumping shiploads of surplus food in southern Africa will not prevent future hunger. The need remains for cleaner government, political stability and more efficient farming methods.